Generally printers used by higher education institutions and corporate organizations are connected to an internal or local network so that the printers may be shared between the users, i.e. the students and staff or workers.
In order to control access as well as to control or limit the costs associated with printing, document management or print accounting systems, collectively referred to as authenticated printing systems, are used for tracking and accounting for printing activity. Print activity tracking and accounting is typically based on a user's network username. For this to work, each print job should comprise the user's network username in the print job details. Accordingly, when a user prints a document from his personal computer, PC, the print job generated from the document has the users network username in the job details or print job metadata, e.g. in the header of the print job file, for use by the authenticated printing systems. When the user prints from a conventional PC, the network user name is readily available for incorporation in the print job details as the user typically logs on onto the PC, and onto the local network to which the PC is connected, using the network user name.
Conventionally the document to be printed is stored on the user's PC or on a server on the internal or local network. With this set up, the user is required to access his PC, or at least be logged into the internal or local network, if he wishes to access the document in order to print it. This restriction of the users freedom in regard to the location he can access and print the document from has in pad been mitigated by, on one hand storing the document to be printed on a portable storage media such as a portable hard drive or memory stick, and on the other hand the use of Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology allowing the user to initiate a connection for secured access to the internal or local network from another location such as his home. These solutions, while allowing the user a degree of freedom in his location when accessing the document, are however not without drawbacks. Using a portable storage medium entails the risk of losing the portable storage medium and thus the possible release of the document to unauthorized user's. Furthermore, different versions of a document on the user's PC a work and on the users portable storage medium may lead to confusion and mistakes. Using VPN technology also has its drawbacks as the VPN technology may be costly to implement and difficult to use for the user.
In the face of these challenges, and driven by the desire to allow the user to access his document from any location in a simple way, “Cloud storage” systems, also known as “Online storage” services or “Cloud storage” services, one example being the Google Drive™ online storage service, have been devised. “Cloud” in “Cloud Storage” is related to the concept of Cloud Computing, which comprises network based services provided by virtual servers running and distributed on one or more real servers. “Online” in online service refers to that the service is accessed via the Internet. Thus, an online service is a service that can be accessed over the internet. Thus, the service may be accessed from any location from which access to the cloud storage system, typically via the internet, is possible.
To use the Cloud storage system the used registers a user account with a cloud storage system and subsequently uploads documents and files of various file formats to the user account. The documents are then stored in the cloud storage system or in databases or servers accessible to the cloud storage system. When the user needs to retrieve a document, he can use any PC set up to allow access to the cloud storage system, typically via the internet, to navigate to a web site hosted by the cloud storage system, where he identifies himself with his user credentials in order to gain access to his user account to browse and download any of the documents stored in association with his used account.
In this way the user may access his documents from any location, such as his home using his home PC, from which access to the cloud storage system is available, in order to download the document he wishes to print to his computer, wherefrom he may print it on a printer.
There is thus no need for complicated solutions for establishing secured access to the internal or local network where the user works, nor is the user required to carry around a portable storage medium.
Techniques for handling and printing documents stored in cloud storage systems and other types of external storage systems are known from inter alia WO13113926A1, U.S. Pat. No. 7,565,400B2 and U.S. Pat. No. 8,310,703B2.